The SiteRoot team6 min read
We have built websites for 42 businesses now, and photographs are still the hardest part of the job. Not the writing. The writing is difficult and we spend most of our effort on it. The photos are worse, because we cannot take them for you.
The reason they matter is narrow and worth being clear about. The only real question in a visitor's head is whether you are a genuine business near them who does this work. A stock photo of a smiling man in a spotless kitchen answers that question badly, because it could be any business anywhere on earth. A slightly crooked photo of your own van outside a real house answers it immediately. So here is the shot list. It takes about an hour, on a phone you already own, and it will do more for the site than any redesign.
The ten shots
1. The van or the ute. Signage readable, parked somewhere ordinary, taken from a few steps back so the whole vehicle is in frame. This is the single most persuasive photo most trades have, and hardly anybody has taken it on purpose.
2. You. Actually you, in work clothes, at the job, from about chest height, taken by somebody else. Not a selfie, not sunglasses, not a studio portrait in a shirt you never wear. People choose a person, and the page with a face on it feels like a business with somebody answering the phone.
3. Hands on the work, close. The fitting, the terminal, the joint, the brush. Get near enough that it fills the frame. These are the images that go alongside text and make a page look like work rather than a brochure.
4. Before and afters, three pairs. Same spot, same height, same framing, one photo before you start and one when you finish. The discipline is standing in the same place both times, which means taking the before shot before you have done anything, which is the hard part. Set a habit: park, walk in, photograph, then get the tools.
5. The finished job, wide. From the doorway, in daylight, with the lights on. One per type of work you want more of.
6. The tidy up. Drop sheets down, floor swept, offcuts bagged, tools stacked. Almost nobody photographs this, and the state a place gets left in is one of the things customers talk about afterwards. A photo of a clean site is an argument you cannot make as well in words.
7. The ute drawer or the tool board. Organised, in daylight. It reads as somebody who is methodical, without you having to claim you are methodical.
8. The workshop or the yard, if you have one. An address that exists is reassuring.
9. Your crew. Even if the crew is you, an apprentice and a dog. Two minutes, in front of the van, at the end of a job.
10. The thing that is specifically yours. The drain camera, the thermal camera, the scaffold, the machine nobody else on your street owns. That is your differentiator, and it is invisible in a stock photo.
How to take them on a phone
None of this requires a camera. It requires about six habits.
- Wipe the lens. A trade phone lens is filthy and it is why your photos look foggy.
- Daylight, with the sun behind you. Never shoot towards a window or you will get a silhouette.
- Tap the screen on the thing you want sharp, not on the background.
- Step closer instead of zooming. Zoom makes the photo worse; your feet do not.
- Landscape for anything going across the top of a page, portrait for a gallery. If you only remember one, shoot landscape.
- Flash off. In a dark cupboard or under a sink, put a work light in there instead. Flash flattens everything and makes a clean job look grubby.
- Take five of each and delete four. The good one is almost never the first one.
What makes a photo unusable
Every one of these turns up constantly and each one is fixable at the moment of taking.
- A photo of a photo, or a screenshot from a messaging app. Send the original file, not a screenshot of it.
- A date stamp burned into the corner. Turn that off in the camera settings.
- A portrait photo of a wide space, so the actual work is a thin strip in the middle.
- A customer's mail, family photos, medications or number plate in frame. Move them or reframe.
- A dark room with a bright window behind the subject.
- A photo where nothing is happening. An empty repainted room is not interesting. A brush in the frame is.
Ask first, and leave the address out
Two rules worth being strict about, because they cost nothing and the alternative is a bad afternoon.
Ask the customer before you photograph inside their home, and say what it is for. Most people say yes immediately. Some do not, and they are entitled to.
Never publish anything that identifies where somebody lives: no street numbers, no letterboxes with the number on, no shots that take in the neighbour's house. If it is a rental, the tenant is not the person who can give you permission for the property.
Where each shot goes
- The van, or the wide finished job: across the top of the home page.
- You, and your crew: the about page.
- Hands on work, and the before and afters: the page for that specific job, next to the words about it.
- The tidy up: wherever you talk about price. It is the answer to what am I actually paying for.
- The workshop and the tool board: the about page, or the page for builders and property managers if you have one.
The bit about file size
Images on the sites we build load as the visitor scrolls down to them, rather than all at once up front, which keeps a photo heavy page usable on mobile data in somebody's driveway.
That helps, but it does not make a 12 megabyte photo small. If your phone offers to send a smaller version when you share a photo, take it. The image on a website does not need to be big enough to print.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
When we build a site, we choose images that suit your trade and the services you told us about, and every one of them can be swapped for your own. That is the honest state of it: the images we pick are competent and they are not yours, and yours are better.
So this is the one piece of homework we will keep nagging about. An hour with a phone, in daylight, working through the ten shots above, is the highest value hour available to anybody with a trade website. We have not found a way to do it for you, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
